Evidence of Life - By Barbara Taylor Sissel Page 0,80
it?”
Abby said she had, that she knew the story behind it, but Hank paid no attention.
“It’s where Indians drove an entire herd of wild horses off the canyon edge rather than let the U.S. cavalry have them, and they rotted there until there was nothing left but their bones. That’s how it got its name. They say sometimes you can still hear the horses screaming.” Hank snicked his tongue against his teeth. “You want to talk about eerie.”
No, Abby thought, and she turned to the passenger window, but rather than the view, what confronted her was an image in her mind’s eye of all those bones. Bones strewn in careless heaps, unclaimed, unmourned. But it was so easy out here for such things to happen, for an animal or a car—a car with her husband and daughter in it—to fly off the cracked lip of some bluff and tumble into an abyss. And whatever life survived such a fall was then left to suffer horribly and to die alone without comfort.
Despair boiled right under the surface of Abby’s skin; she could feel the heated pressure mounting and she fisted her hands. She could not do this, could not lose her composure, not now, not in front of this man, this near stranger. She groped in her mind for something else, a distraction, and remembered the fawn. Dennis’s fawn. She wondered how it was doing, if it had grown. She wondered what Dennis would say if he could see her now. He had told her not to do anything crazy. He had said she should call him first.
The car slowed; they turned again to the west. Ground up an even steeper incline. The engine shuddered as if it might stall. Abby glanced at Hank. “Not much farther,” he said.
“Are there neighbors?” she asked.
“Not in any direction for maybe five miles.”
“So you can come and go without anyone knowing, I guess.”
Hank’s brows rose as if he wondered what she meant.
Abby wasn’t sure herself, only that she felt anxious, but along with that, she felt a certain sense of fatalism, too. She guessed she’d come too far now to be afraid. So what if Hank had dangerous intentions? Life itself concealed dangerous intentions. You could never know them ahead of time. Uncertainty was adversity’s companion. Or maybe it was calamity’s companion. Hadn’t she heard that somewhere?
The car stopped, and the cabin materialized out of the mist, a snug-looking, unassuming little house made of logs. A neatly kept house. A house that looked cared for despite its great age, that even looked loved. Abby could love it, she thought, in some mix of wonder and consternation. She studied the wide front porch, trying to imagine Nick seated on the rough wooden bench by the door. If she put her hand on it, would she intuit his presence? Feel some vibration? But she avoided contact with it altogether when she followed Hank through the front door.
He disappeared through an archway on Abby’s left. She closed the door and looked around, bemused. The room had low ceilings with beams that gave it a cozy feel. But it was the way it was furnished that captured Abby’s attention, or rather it was the little touches that drew her, how the light coming through the lace curtain hanging in the front window showed off the delicacy of its pattern. She didn’t mind that the edges were frayed. It only added to the charm. The wood floor was scarred and uneven, but there were rugs, floral-patterned in soft faded colors of rose and green and gold.
Abby crossed the room to one corner where someone had set a gorgeous seashell, a huge conch, on a tiny ornate table. She ran her fingertips lightly over the unfurled lip that was ruffled and tinged a shade of pink as delicate as the curl of sea foam at dawn. On the wall above it, a small, framed oil painting led her eye through an open garden gate and down a flower-bordered path. There were shelves on another wall filled with books and photographs, and in a windowed alcove that gave a view of the back of the property, a dining table for two in front of the window held a green glass vase filled with dried grasses.
She could have chosen these furnishings herself, Abby thought; she could move into this little home this very instant and be comfortable, delighted even, to live here. She thought of Hank’s house in Houston, its drab, sterile